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Comment by epolanski | Hacker News Reader

It's the same reason analysts come from math rather than economy degrees.

You can teach a mathematician what he needs to know about finance, you can hardly do the opposite.

In my experience, people with degrees in math, physics, chemistry, biology/medicine, astronomy, computer science have higher/stronger intellectual rigor that can be re-applied to other fields, e.g., finance. Also, those areas of study are much harder than economics. Partly, it is a self-selection process. Yes, there are some with economics degrees whom are very bright, but they probably could have majored in any of the sciences mentioned earlier.

The story I’ve heard is the economics undergrads can’t get into economics grad school. This is just a rumor but the sentiment is that undergrads get taught a watered down version of economics theory. Economics theory is potentially very technical and includes game theory and proofs. Even in CS, undergrads take intro theory courses and “bottom out” in their math skills, even though grad-level CS gets much more difficult. Therefore, I’d imagine the primary determinant of this rigor phenomenon is the GPA inflation of the major.

This is somewhat true - economics undergrads do get into grad school, though math+econ or an econ degree with lots of math is better. You can just the check the difference between the textbooks for undergrad and graduate economics, eg Principles of Economics by Mankiw (undergrad) and Mas Collel (grad).

That’s the opposite of what OP is observing. It’s easier to teach a domain expert “good enough” quantitative and technical skills than to teach a pure quant “good enough” domain expertise (and the corresponding intuition)

I think you’re reading this backwards, or perhaps it was edited? Mathematics is surely the more pure discipline compared with economics, so physics : CS :: mathematics : finance is the right ordering.

You just decided that one of those expertises is the "domain" while the other is not. There's no reason at all to pick one of them.

and it's easier yet to find one of each that are willing to collaborate.

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